Coolest Tool Award/2020
The second edition of the Coolest Tool Award happened virtually on 11 December 2020, 17:00 UTC, live streamed on Youtube in the MediaWiki channel.
The award is organized & selected by the Coolest Tool Academy. Members of the 2020 edition are: Zack, Neslihan, Masssly, Magnus Manske, Krishna, Joaquin and Birgit.
2020 Winners
| Winner | 🎥 | Category | Category description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWB (AutoWikiBrowser) | 📼 | Editor | Tools that augment editing |
| SDZeroBot | 📼 | Newcomer | New tools or tools by new developers |
| Proofread Page extension | 📼 | Impact | Tools that have broad or deep impact |
| Listen to Wikipedia | 📼 | Experience | Intuitive and easy to use |
| GlobalUserPage | 📼 | Reusable | Serves many wikis and projects |
| AbuseFilter | 📼 | Quality | Tools to improve content quality |
| Pywikibot | 📼 | Developer | Tools that primarily serve developers |
| Lingua Libre | 📼 | Diversity | Tools that help include a variety of people, languages, cultures ... |
| CropTool | 📼 | Tiny | Small tools and tools that do one thing well |
| XTools | 📼 | Eggbeater | Tools in use for more than 10 years |
|
Listeria |
📼 | Honorable mentions |
Editor: AWB (AutoWikiBrowser)
AutoWikiBrowser –by Bluemoose, Magioladitis, Reedy, Rjwilmsi, and Kingboyk– is a semi-automated MediaWiki editor designed to make tedious or repetitive editing tasks quicker and easier.
In the words of users:
“This tool has helped me a lot in making tedious or repetitive edits. Making a large number of edits takes a very short time. Everyone can use it with permission. And you don't need to know programming, but if you do, you can do greater things.”
“It is heavily used in Turkish Wikipedia where I am more active. It is very helpful for semi-automated operations where it would take a long time to do manually and can’t be done by bots since they would need to be approved by a person.”
AutoWikiBrowser has been around for many years helping editors across wikis edit with ease.
Newcomer: SDZeroBot
SDZeroBot –by SD0001– is a bot that generates collections of userspace reports that streamlines processes –like AFC and NPP by sorting articles by ORES topics and showing an excerpt of the lead section–.
“This tool has made it easier to find AFC submissions, new pages (for NPP), articles proposed for deletion (PROD/AFD) , good article nominations, peer review requests etc where the article subject is of my interest. The short descriptions, excerpts, and ORES sorting helps editors find articles they're interested in. Before SDZeroBot, there did not exist any tool that used the very useful ORES topic prediction service, nor one that listified articles at the various processes (AFC, AFD, etc) with excerpts.”
“Recently encountered this bot's work at Wikipedia:User_scripts/Most_imported_scripts which is very cool”
The bot started operating in 2020, and it has a lot of potential for providing insightful lists and summaries for many use cases and communities.
Impact: Proofread Page extension
Proofread_Page Extension –by TPT, ThomasV– can render a book either as a column of OCR text beside a column of scanned images, or broken into its logical organization (such as chapters or poems) using transclusion.
It allows easy comparison of text to the original digitization and it shows the text in several ways without actually duplicating the original text.
The extension is installed on all Wikisource wikis and it has been used to proofread millions of pages.
“The extension that makes Wikisource possible.”
“This extension is the heart piece of Wikisource.”
Experience: Listen to Wikipedia
Listen to Wikipedia –by Stephen LaPorte, Mahmoud Hashemi– is a creative, beautiful, playful way of interacting with our data by showing visualizations and sounds based on edits and other events.
Reusable: GlobalUserPage
GlobalUserPage Extension –by Jack Phoenix and Legoktm– lets you reuse the same user page across multiple wikis in a wikifarm.
At Wikimedia, users with an account can create a global user page for all Wikimedia projects on Meta wiki.
“GlobalUserPage is a key and essential feature for the global wiki community. It allows users to keep their user pages in sync, reduces friction, and makes coordination across wikis a lot easier.”
“I still can remember how it was before GlobalUserPage became available in 2015. Maintaining user pages across wikis was cumbersome, and mine definitely got out of sync”
Quality: AbuseFilter
AbuseFilter Extension –by Daimona Eaytoy, Andrew Garrett, Marius Hoch, River Tarnell, Victor Vasiliev– allows privileged users to set specific actions to be taken when actions by users, such as edits, match certain criteria.
For example, a filter could be created to prevent anonymous users from adding external links, or to block a user who removes more than 2000 characters.
“One interface to control nasty edits. Can’t tell how useful it's been all these years.”
“AbuseFilter allows you to set filters in order to block certain bad actions in a wiki. AbuseFilter is enabled an all wikis.”
“Key feature to find/monitor activities that follow certain suspicious patterns, and block bad edits/actions.”
A highly versatile tool, developed over more than 10 years that helps wikis all around maintain quality of content
Developer: Pywikibot
Pywikibot –by xqt, John Vandenberg, Fabian Neundorf, and many others– is a Python library and collection of scripts that automate work on MediaWiki sites. Originally designed for Wikipedia, it is now used throughout the Wikimedia Foundation's projects and on many other wikis.
“I personally use this tool often, find it super helpful”
“The value of Pywikibot is incredible. Endless scripts available, and a strong community behind it. Makes bot development much more accessible for folks with less programming skills”
“Pywikibot is a key framework for developing bots for the Wikimedia projects or any MediaWiki wiki. Its impact is huge. Makes bot development much easier, and comes with scripts for a variety of tasks. It has an active developer community with a mailinglist, IRC channel and more. It has more than 160 contributors to the code base. First developed in 2002.”
Diversity: Lingua Libre
Lingua Libre –by 0x010C– is a project which aims to build a collaborative, multilingual, audiovisual corpus under free licence.
You can explore and reuse recordings, contribute to the corpus by recording words, or improve the website itself, in consultation with the community.
You can record short audios (1 word, 1 phrase), categorize them and publish them on Wikimedia Commons from a computer or smartphone
- It expands knowledge about languages and in languages in an audiovisual way on the web, on Wikimedia projects and outside
- Supports the development of online language communities — particularly those of poorly endowed, minority, regional, oral or signed languages
“Easy to use, powerful and useful”
“Best cross-wiki tool ever (using Commons and publishing to Wikidata & Wiktionaries)”
“It holds the power to increase the visibility of marginalized communities through the promotion of their linguistic heritage.”
In September 2020, the platform reached 300,000 recordings in 91 languages (357 speakers).
Tiny: CropTool
CropTool, by Dan Michael O. Heggø, is a tool for cropping images at Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia sites.
- It supports JPEG, PNG, TIFF and (animated) GIF files
- Can extract single pages from DJVU and PDF files as JPEG for cropping
- Features automatic border detection
- The result can replace the original file or be uploaded as a new one
“Very useful to crop eg individual pictures from a group of people”
“I love this tool <3”
“It is easy to use and well integrated with Commons; you log in with OAuth, choose how to crop an image and upload it. It has a variety of uses, from cropping out watermarks or unnecessary parts of images, to cropping out a single person from a group photo.”
Eggbeater: XTools
XTools –by X!, rewritten by Hedonil, rewritten by MusikAnimal, Mathewrbowker et al.– is a statistics tool that presents and visualizes information about users, articles, and other items in Wikimedia projects.
- You can find it both as a gadget in many language projects or use it directly on Wikimedia Labs.
- Originally developed in 2008, the tool likely bears the name of its original developer, “user:X!”, yet it has been rewritten by many since then.
- Thousands of people use it as a gadget (XTools-ArticleInfo) in English Wikipedia alone.
- Its interface is available in dozens of languages.
XTools gives you an extra dash of motivation to keep going.
Honorable mentions
Listeria
Listeria bot –by Magnus Manske– is a lifesaver when it comes to generating lists on Wikipedia, based on Wikidata queries.
This handy bot is used by brilliant projects like Women in Red, Wiki Loves Monuments and many more.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector
Earwig's Copyvio Detector by Ben Kurtovic.
No one likes dealing with copyright violations. This amazing tool helps detect possible copyright violations for you.
Wikidata Lexeme Forms
Wikidata Lexeme Forms by Lucas Werkmeister. In the words of a user of this tool "Very convenient way to add lexemes to Wikidata. As easy as playing Tetris." Even more, it has multiple language support.
Convenient Discussions
Convenient Discussions –by JWBTH (Jack who built the house)– allows the user to post and edit comments without switching to a separate page.
The users of this tool said they didn't know how they could live without it. Convenient Discussions, you are loved!
Wudele
Wudele –by Jean Frédéric– is a deployment of Framadate (a free/libre software to schedule events and create polls) on the Wikimedia Cloud Toolforge.
Entity Explosion
Entity Explosion –by Toby Hudson– is a browser extension to discover links and information about the topic of a webpage using data from Wikidata.
As one reviewer wrote: "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!"